It All Comes Out In The Wash...

I have made our own laundry detergent for a couple of years now.  It's not that I am a soap-a-phobe that is worried about every little chemical that we come into contact with.  Nope.

It's that I squeeze every penny I can.  I can not stand waste, and to me....spending $20 a month to wash clothes is just too much.

Now before you have visions of me standing over a cheese grater with a bar of this...

I do use Fels-Naptha ($1.29 and will last a year), but not in my laundry detergent.  It is what I use in place of Shout or other pre-treatment.  Especially with a toddler....stuff gets stained; peel that bar of Fels-Naptha like a banana, wet the stain and rub the soap on it and the stain will be gone.  Then I just toss the clothes into the washer with my home made laundry soap and everything comes out clean.
My laundry detergent has 2 ingredients....

To make it, mix 8# of Baking Soda with a box of Borax (4# 12oz size...used to be 5#).  I mix it in a bucket with a slotted spoon....be careful not to breath in any of it...it's dusty.

To use, I just use a regular plastic scoop that comes in every box of detergent.  Our clothes come out clean and fresh every time.  It even gets the smell out of the towels and blankets I use in the kidding barn and playpens.  The only drawback to using that detergent is that it does not soften the clothes.  For that, I have discovered these:

These run about $6 each regularly, but about once a year I catch them on sale for $3....so I buy 4 of them at a time (which is a year's worth).  They last about 3 months; they soften the clothes, cut down on static, and make everything smell nice.

So I spend less than $40 per year to do laundry.

The next big washing cost is running the dishwasher.  I've only had my dishwasher for a couple of years and I was shocked at the price of detergent.  I just thought it was a cost that we had to absorb, although I did try to buy the cheapest detergent I could find that would get the job done.

So I started a search to find something that would be inexpensive that I could make myself.  Which brought me here.

I couldn't find the Castille soap that she mentions....so I found something that I thought would be an appropriate substitute. 

I am making it today and will try it for the first time this evening.  I'll let you know how it works!